Saadet Turkoz: "I was born in Istanbul in 1961 and I am currently living in Zurich.

Due to the political pressure of the Chinese government upon the Turk people in East Turkestan (Uyghur Autonomous Region), my parents fled to Istanbul, where they settled as Kazakh refugees. They transmitted us the rich oral and musical traditions of the highlands of Central Asia. With the tales of their far away country and their journey to Turkey, the elderly people of the Kasakh community influenced my imagination as musician until nowadays.

I'v always been impressed by kazakh and Turkish music. I'm deeply moved by its humanity, its archaic power and its melancholy.

As a child, living in Istanbul near the Marmara Sea, I wanted to be a hodscha, a Koran teacher. I was fascinated by the Arabic language and the melodious texts of the Koran which gave me the first opportunity to deliberately improvise without paying attention to sense and correctness.

I was 20 years old when I left Istanbul to join my sister in Switzerland. There I experienced an exciting new world of music: free jazz, improvisation and a refreshing openness towards experimentation which parallelled my unbiased approach of the musical traditions of my origins.

In my improvisations as well as performances of Kazakh and Turkish songs I am looking to transform memory. I seek to evoke pictures and atmosphere by means of voice and music which transcend cultural boundaries. Memory is everywhere and every time the same - not changeable - but the expression is different: Individual perception develops a universal impression of the cultural life."

"Elliott Sharp is an American multi-instrumentalist, composer, and performer.

A central figure in the avant-garde and experimental music scene in New York City for over 30 years, Elliott Sharp has released over eighty-five recordings ranging from orchestral music to blues, jazz, noise, no wave rock, and techno music. He leads the projects Carbon and Orchestra Carbon, Tectonics, and Terraplane and has pioneered ways of applying fractal geometry, chaos theory, and genetic metaphors to musical composition and interaction.

His collaborators have included Radio-Sinfonie Frankfurt; pop singer Debbie Harry; Ensemble Modern; Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; Kronos String Quartet; Ensemble Resonanz; cello innovator Frances Marie Uitti; blues legends Hubert Sumlin and Pops Staples; pipa virtuoso Min-Xiao Feng; jazz greats Jack deJohnette, Oliver Lake, and Sonny Sharrock; multimedia artists Christian Marclay and Pierre Huyghe; and Bachir Attar, leader of the Master Musicians Of Jajouka.

Sharp is a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow, and a 2014 Fellow at Parson's Center for Transformative Media. He received the 2015 Berlin Prize in Musical Composition from the American Academy in Berlin. He has composed scores for feature films and documentaries; created sound-design for interstitials on The Sundance Channel, MTV and Bravo networks; and has presented numerous sound installations in art galleries and museums. He is the subject of a new documentary "Doing The Don't" by filmmaker Bert Shapiro."-Elliott Sharp